Before entering teaching in 1994, Alfred Brophy was a law clerk to Judge John Butzner of the United States Court of Appeals (Fourth Circuit), practiced law with Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom in New York, and was a Mellon Fellow in the Humanities at Harvard University. He joined the UNC faculty in 2008, from the University of Alabama, where he taught for many years. He has also taught as a visiting professor at Boston College, the University of Hawaii, Indiana University, and Vanderbilt University. Brophy teaches in the fields of property, trusts and estates, and remedies. During the 2011-12 year, he will teach trusts and estates in the fall and property in the spring.
Alfred Brophy has written extensively on race and property law in colonial, antebellum and early Twentieth Century America. His books are Reconstructing the Dreamland: The Tulsa Riot of 1921, Race, Reparations, Reconciliation (Oxford University Press, 2002) and Reparations Pro and Con (Oxford University Press, 2006). He is the lead co-author with Alberto Lopez and Kali Murray of Integrating Spaces: Property Law and Race (Aspen, 2011) and co-editor with Daniel W. Hamilton of Transformations in American Legal History (Harvard 2009) and Transformations in American Legal History--Law, Ideology, and Methods, Essays in Honor of Morton J. Horwitz, volume II (Harvard 2010). He has also published extensively in law reviews, including the Boston University Law Review, Columbia Law Review, Indiana Law Journal, Journal of Legal Education, North Carolina Law Review, and the Texas Law Review. He gave a distinguished lecture ("Property and Progress: Antebellum Landscape Art and Property Law") in 2008 at the University of the Pacific's McGeorge Law School, which was published in the McGeorge Law Review. In March 2010, he delivered the Hutchins Lecture to the Center for the Study of the American South, on constitutional ideas in literary addresses at UNC before the Civil War, which was published in the North Carolina Law Review in September 2011. Also in September 2011 he delivered the Hendricks lecture at Washington and Lee University, on "the jurisprudence of slavery, freedom, and Union at Washington College, 1831 to 1861." In March 2012 he will deliver the annual spring lecture at the University of Florida's Center for the Study of Race and Race Relations on "The Ideological Origins of Secession: Slavery, The Constitution, and Southern Universities." From 2003 to 2010 he served as book reviews editor of Law and History Review.
Brophy is completing a book on antebellum jurisprudence, tentatively titled University, Court, and Slave. He is also co-editing with Sally Hadden the Blackwell Companion to American Legal History (forthcoming Wiley-Blackwell 2012) and co-editing with Patrick Erben and Margo Lambert the writings of seventeenth century jurist Francis Daniel Pastorius, one of the first to protest slavery in the New World. Some of his other current research is on the intersection of property and equity, implied trust beneficiaries, monument and cemetery law, empirical investigation of the probate process and trustee behavior in the South before the Civil War, trust law regarding slavery, creditors' rights, and quasi-freedom in the pre-Civil War South, constitutional and legal thought in pre-Civil War oratory, property jurisprudence in North and South before the Civil War, and the idea of equality in early twentieth century black thought and its influence on the civil rights movement.
Brophy received his A.B. from the University of Pennsylvania (summa cum laude), a Ph.D. from Harvard University, and a J.D. from Columbia University, where he served as an editor of the Columbia Law Review.
When he is not teaching, doing pro bono work, or writing, he enjoys a number of hobbies, including reading the advance sheets of F.3d and coding pre-Civil War judicial opinions and wills for analysis. Some of his recent publications are available at the social science research network. Here's a better picture of Alfred Brophy (in high resolution). Some of Brophy's occasional, lighter commentary is available at the faculty lounge blog.